blocke

We at work (a 4 year college) are busy moving all student email to Google Apps. The move will also cover network storage we currently provide to students.

When evaluating our options we found that students didn't seem to care about Google Docs, Microsoft's online Office tools, etc.

I'd be really skeptical about them making it that flexible. There has to be some minimum timeframe involved to make it profitable.

You are comparing watching TV to a vital communication tool that is essential to the student experience. It's fair enough that you may not have an issue with it. But in my opinion the thought of a large multinational being able to go "poof, I hereby revoke your access to the Internet" in an academic environment to be frightening.

There is also the factor of "crap, I somehow missed a payment and now I can't complete my coursework" when colleges are busy trying to get rid of computer labs because "everyone has a laptop".

If a student were to outright buy a netbook using financial aid then those concerns go away.

Again I wouldn't give a crap either way if it were a contract/ETF arrangement but rent to always rent just seems like a bad financial habit to develop early in life.

We'll have to wait for the details. This makes it sound like you are renting the device which would be a very bad direction for the industry to be moving in.

If it's something like how cellphones have a monthly cost for X months with an ETF but you really own the device then it wouldn't be as bad. Might even be decent for the poor student with a work study allowance like I had when starting out.

"Who cares if they sound unprofessional to you? Very obviously they produce."

Sadly we can't verify that in this case. Because you know, we're not the CIA.

"Dear Google Employees reading HN: This exploit, along with VUPEN's affiliation to goverment agencies, scared the crap out of me. Having used Chrome since it's earliest days, I'm now forced to switch my main browser to FF4; it remains so until confirmation from either parties of the bug's "fixed" status."

I think it's time for you to take your computer out back and set it on fire. Best way to be safe until Google fixes this. Whatever it is.

If you think there isn't an active 0-day against Firefox or IE or Safari or... oh boy. This is news because such things are rare against Chrome. Welcome to software.

"They can either pay a nominal fee for doing their security work for them, or they can hire some equally talented people and fund this type of research on their own internally."

What makes you think they don't already? You make it sound like Google doesn't give a shit about security. That clearly isn't the case.

"The box says Motorola. That means they signed off shipping it. Even if any problems with it can be placed firmly at Google's door, it still says Motorola on the box. I think that was the previous commenter's point."

Fair enough. Motorola definitely shares blame.

But at the end of the day all that is Android ends at Google's feet. Why play games with holding back the 3.0 source if you don't at least feel you have some responsibility for how Android launches on tablets?

Fascinating article and videos. Thanks for sharing.

Chaotic yet organized systems like this fascinate me.

"That's not Google doing 'everything it can to hamstring' — That's Motorola shipping a product based on an OS that's obviously not ready. Motorola's fault."

Google controls Android 3.0 completely. They very intentionally did not make a source release. Google entered the relationship with Motorola and it damn well had control over who was going to ship a 3.0 device. They knew what they were doing. They HAD to beat the iPad 2 release date at all costs.

So now all we have is a buggy as hell 3.0 OS with no source release and we're still waiting for them to fix stuff. I hope the early release to beat the iPad furthered some other business goal because it didn't further Android as a great Tablet OS.

The flaws I've seen in the device are clear OS and Software issues. So unless your point of view is that it's up to other people to fix Google's fuckups... eh...

Google has done everything it can to hamstring this launch. The software sucks. Buggy, Crashy, Beta quality. The emulator's performance is so bad it's unusable. The tablet section of the market is empty of real tablet apps. The Android Market can't even handle reorienting itself.

The Android team doesn't seem to give a shit. Ask anyone who has tried to support Android is an Enterprise how bad the Exchange, VPN and 802.1x stacks have been since day one. Business as usual. Their public issue tracker is obviously intended as a space for frustrated users [1] to shout into a bottomless pit of who gives a shit.

I used to be a major Android fan but screw this. If only WebOS was open source...

[1] - Edited to substitute users for customers. Real users are not Google's customers. And the experience shows.

Why oh why did they buy Media Molecule.

It sucks I have to chose between playing such awesome games and keeping my privacy and financial information safe.

PS3 is the last Sony product I'll ever buy.

"We probably shouldn't talk about viruses or security flaws, either -- might give someone the idea that it's ok to break into a machine. We ought to respect it by not discussing such things."

I interpreted the OP to be more disgusted at someone making a business out of actively circumventing a control then we discussing that it exists.

That is a bit different than discussing the existence of flaws. In this case it's making money off actively exploiting the flaws.

I'm not anywhere near being a Java expert but I've seen similar behavior with a non-Hadoop workload.

In my case I had several virtual machines hosting Java VMs with 2+GB heaps running an app that liked to fork and run external programs for short periods of time. If the entire heapsize was say 3GB and it forked twice Linux would act like it needed 9GB. The Linux overcommit heuristic regularly got things wrong and wanted RAM that it would never actually use. This usually resulted in the JVM failing in new and interesting ways.

The workaround is to allocate a crapload of swap (mainly more than heap size times a guestimate of number of concurrent forks). It will never actually USE the swap but having it there seems keep the overcommit heuristic happy.

Yay for cargo cult server tuning. I've never figured out how to get the kernel to not be so pessimistic and I can't modify the Java code in question so... eh.

"Yes, because if Richard Stallman was wget'ing his daily webpages, he would have a lot of trouble interpreting that site without going into xwindows."

Your indifference to the Blind is touching. But at least you got your off-topic troll in.

It's good that Microsoft is viewing integration into it's OS stack as a way to squeeze out performance but if that also doesn't translate into an accelerated ship schedule then who cares.

One year is an eternity.

It handles QuickTime and Java the same way it handles Popups. It puts a yellow bar at the top asking for permission to "Run this time" or "Always run on this site".

Hit the "Always run on this site" button on Apple.com and your internal sites.

It's now "ask for permission to run" instead of "always run". It's in the same boat as intranet sites needing popup permissions.

This. So incredibly this.

I love this damn feature and now that it's here I'm going to be impatient with any browser that doesn't. I can now feel safe leaving Java turned on.

Haha, yeah, thanks. I'd correct that typo but I've already been nailed for it. ;)

Are you sure every codec on your system is kept up to date against the latest exploits? Every single one?

Which is updated more often... Your browser or your codecs?

Browsers are taking over certain functions because the OS side (both OS X and Windows) are a mess. I imagine it makes browsers easier to test too not having even more dependencies over the quirks of whatever dot release of the OS you are running.

As someone who uses Chrome under Mac, Windows and Linux I applaud this move.

The Quicktime plugin on Windows is HORRID. It is a prime example of how to make a user experience complete shit. And to be honest I'd prefer the Mac version not pull it in automatically either. Weither it's the crashing, slow startup times, bazaar buffering behavior or taking over way too many MIME types I hate it.

I strongly prefer that Chrome asked my permission before executing either the Quicktime or Java plugins just like it prompts for popups. All are annoying, buggy, laggy and crashy.

Both Quicktime and Java were manually disabled globally on every browser I use and now I can feel safe leaving them on. This change makes my web browsing experience SAFER and less frustrating.

Of course my dream is never to have to touch QuickTime or that horrid Apple Update garbage on Windows ever again. I'm not buying a Mac for home because Apple can't be trusted around VisualStudio.

Flash gets the pass because Adobe lets Google worry about making sure updates are available on day 1. Odds of Google and Apple working together on Quicktime... Haha... haha... ha.

One would hope this would prod DropBox into offering more fine grained pricing tiers and a sharing tier less than $700/month but I'm not going to hold my breath. The money they are pulling in now is too good to bother.

Hello cloud based iTunes.

"Half the price of dropbox, this is just begging for a kick ass desktop/mobile app."

And I want a pony.

No client sync software, no sharing. I think the Dropbox folks will sleep well at night.

Smooth client software is half the value of paying for Dropbox and I don't see an Amazon side project challenging Dropbox in client usability anytime soon.

This looks more like a middle finger to any eventual iTunes cloud strategy.

Not the first "you've been pwned" message on the Internet and won't be the last.

It just happens to be the first I've seen use Google Analytics to track the lulz with CSS and @font-face. With that layout I was expecting to see a customer rant, not a "pwned" message.

On a more serious note are they going to be able to afford to have a separate EC2 instance per customer to avoid having to write a proper sandbox?

I read it as:

"Why is this crap in my INBOX? Really?"

I'm sure the least compelling reason to keep X11 on Mac is because someone wants to use a C64 emulator. :)

Kudos to the Google folks for releasing this.

It took 5 minutes to figure out and setup and the price is very right. Looking forward to seeing this get improved.

I believe Fortune 500 companies call this "maintaining a startup environment".

</snark>

The response on this is pathetic. Dropbox was made aware that some people have a valid objection to metadata being plaintext three months ago and now they only take it seriously when it shows up on HN?

As a paid DropBox and Android user I'm second guessing use of the product.

Here is a pro-tip: If your way to get "Speed" involves being "Insecure" than someone needs to get wacked aside the head with the hardest nerf bat you can find. Repeatedly. While screaming "NO NO NO THAT'S STUPID".

"Most Android devices are locked down so that users cannot install apps outside the Android Market (aka "sideloading")."

This is new to me. Got any proof?

As far as I know in the US it's just AT&T.